|
|
Post by Josh on Nov 30, 2009 20:57:26 GMT -8
I just started G.K. Chesterton's biography of Thomas Aquinas and I'm really digging it.
It starts with a compare and contrast of the two most influential men of the late middle ages (Francis of Assisi and Thomas Aquinas). In almost every way these two were opposites, but Chesterton points out how God used each to correct opposite errors in Christianity in their own day.
Good night all. It's time for reading in bed....
|
|
|
|
Post by Josh on Dec 2, 2009 21:41:52 GMT -8
I'll be posting some notable quotes from the book (Chesterton is probably the most quotable of my favorite authors)
Here's one for starters:
"The saint is a medicine because he is an antidote. Indeed that is why the saint is often a martyr; he is mistaken for a poison because he is an antidote. He will generally be found restoring the world to sanity by exaggerating whatever the world neglects, which is by no means always the same element in every age. Yet each generation seeks its saint by instinct; and he is not what the people want, but rather what the people need"
Doesn't this ring true?
|
|
|
|
Post by Josh on Dec 6, 2009 21:14:12 GMT -8
"Perhaps it may be misunderstood if I say that St. Francis, for all his love of animals, saved us from being Buddhists; and that St. Thomas, for all his love of Greek philosophy, saved us from being Platonists. But it is best to say the truth in its simplest form; that they both reaffirmed the Incarnation, by bringing God back to earth."
|
|
|
|
Post by Josh on Dec 12, 2009 22:00:36 GMT -8
"As he entered Paris, they showed him the hill- that splendour of new spires beginning, and somebody said something like, 'How grand it must be to own all this'. And Thomas Aquinas only muttered, 'I would rather have that Chrysostom manuscript I can't get ahold of."
;D
|
|
|
|
Post by Josh on Dec 12, 2009 22:03:21 GMT -8
"Now it was the inmost lie of the Manichees [and Gnostics] that they identified purity with sterility. It is singularly contrasted with the language of St. Thomas, which always connects purity with fruitfulness; whether it be natural or supernatural"
|
|
|
|
Post by Josh on Dec 20, 2009 8:51:09 GMT -8
"It was a very special idea of St. Thomas that Man is to be studied in his whole manhood; that a man is not a man without his body, just as he is not a man without his soul. A corpse is not a man; but also a ghost is not a man"
|
|
